Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.

The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.

Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.

The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”

Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400

Damon Krukowski – The New Analog: Listening and Reconnecting in a Digital World

The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262036917, English, 240 pages, 2017, USA

Living in the post-digital also means that we actually can’t exclude the digital altogether anymore. But it doesn’t mean we should abstain from comparing digital to analogue forms with their different pace, sensory and material engagement, to understand our world away from our beloved screens.
This book is a whole journey in recognising different implications to our analogue and digital listening. The author specifically outlines a course over the richness of analogue sound, through meaningful facts, technical notes and behind-the-scenes stories. Removing any fetishism and nostalgia from his writing, he re-evaluates noise, production attitudes, silence, and especially the understanding of elaborated and pleasurable ”ways of listening”. Here even the production and distribution of music are considered for how they affect the listening, which is changed through specific influential technologies, like the overlooked three iPhone microphones, serving the industrial software services more than our sophisticated ears. What the author induces is a conscious slow down of compulsive digital consumption, breaking its continuous loops which feed our famine of cheap immateriality. He explains, compares, and brings back points of reference, lost after, for example, wearing headphones everywhere (and so being “aurally disoriented”) or giving up the production details in digital music products. Krukowski is confronting us directly with the digitally touted “disruption with the past”, proving that it potentially ends up in a miserable “loss of expertise”.